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Monday, June 18, 2012

New Quilt - "Blue Space #1"

In addition to having sat around nearly finished in a box for at least three years, this quilt has an additional claim to fame. The curlycues cut from mat board that are attached to the center of the quilt have been with me since high school! That's right, in one of my first ever printmaking classes we were assigned to create plates for embossing watercolor paper by cutting imagery into mat board. Several coats of gesso later, it turns out that thing will not only be able to pull a giant number of embossed prints but also survive to be reinvented fourteen years later!

Another fun element of this quilt is the background photographs, which I took of blueberries floating in a bowl of water and then printed onto iron-on transfers. I like that it's obvious what you're looking at but at the same time they seem like they could be something else entirely.

The little plastic bauble things at the bottom of the photo above are one of the sad disappointments I've had in my search for art materials. I found a big bag of them at a craft store - they're meant to be placed in the bottom of a vase as an attractive way to hold up floral arrangements. They seemed PERFECT for adding small dots of imagery to my quilts, because they're produced by dripping tiny amounts of molten clear plastic onto a surface, which produces basically a little round clear cabochon the perfect size to fit into a 30SS prong setting meant for Swarovski crystals. My method of using these little guys involved using a 3/16" hole punch to make tiny dots of content from magazine pages which I would adhere to the flat side of the little baubles using clear epoxy. I could then attach them anywhere on a quilt using the prong settings. They were gorgeous. If this seems too perfect to be true, that's definitely because it is. The fatal flaw of these little gems, which I did not discover until I had used them in a number of projects, is that they are extraordinarily brittle. Even a slight impact against a hard surface causes them to shatter. It was tragic to give up on this idea, but I refuse to use anything in my art that will randomly shatter!

Swirly thing carved into a piece of mat board

This piece of mat board with swirly things carved into it is one of those items that I have had for many, many years. I carved the little swirls to make an embossing plate during one of my first ever printmaking classes, way back in high school. The pink around the edge is there because the project in question involved combining the embossing with a silkscreened image, and my idea was to leave a little window in my red ink to accommodate the embossing. Afterward, of course, I couldn't possibly get rid of the mat board with the swirls carved into it - it only took me fifteen years to find a home for it!

About Me

I make art quilts out of just about anything I can get my hands on. I have a goal of not letting anything be left behind, whether it's a sketch, a photo, a random thing I found on the sidewalk, or a scrap of fabric from the trash at work.